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Image & Text : a Journal for Design
Number of Followers: 17

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ISSN (Print) 1020-1497
Published by Sabinet Online Ltd

[185 journals]

Extreme apartheid : the South African system of migrant labour and its
hostels
- Authors: Christo Vosloo
  Abstract: The migrant labour system was an historical system used to reconcile the conflicting need for cheap labour in the mines and cities, with the apartheid ideology that workers should not reside there on a permanent basis. Labourers were housed in a unique accommodation type that developed from the Kimberley Closed Compound into the Witwatersrand Mine Compound and ultimately the migrant labour hostel. During the late colonial and apartheid periods, the mining compounds and the migrant labour hostels, which formed a key element of this system, were designed (and functioned) as tools of control and repression. In time they became synonymous with violence, overcrowding and squalor. As with so many other political and social systems, dismantling the migrant labour apparatus, and undoing the harm it caused, often requires even more tenacious efforts over a period of time.
  PubDate: 2020-06-01T00:00:00Z
Embedded participation in the architectural curriculum towards engendering
urban citizenship in graduates
- Authors: Carin Combrinck; Rienie Venter
  Abstract: Instilling ethical development and a regard for the production of urban space through vertical and horizontal curriculum participation may equip architectural graduates with the capacity to engage with the complexity and temporal fluidity of urban citizenship. Creative outputs of four academic year groups in an Architecture department who engaged with a particular township community in South Africa were considered in terms of Perry’s Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development and how this relates to Lefebvre’s notion of lived space. The students’ levels of engagement and recognition of the complexity of social structures were reflected in the levels of ethical development presented in the models used. In this paper we argue that it is necessary to distribute curricular participation vertically throughout the curriculum to ensure that students are able to transcend from one level to the following in order to resolve the complexities they are confronted with in the spatial and ontological challenges inscribed within urban citizenship.
  PubDate: 2020-06-01T00:00:00Z
Remembering the pass – exploring curatorial reenactment in PASS-AGES :
references & footnotes
- Authors: Jayne Crawshay-Hall
  Abstract: The exhibition, PASS-AGES: References & Footnotes (2010), curated by Gabi Ngcobo, was site-specific and took place at the former Pass Office in Johannesburg, a space not officially acknowledged as a struggle site. Ngcobo, recognising the potential for using dynamic display formats to mobilise a curatorial concept, brought memory to the fore by installing artworks at the Pass Office as reenactments of evidence. I argue that PASS-AGES invokes traumatic memory through curatorial reenactment, and indicates the potentials for reenactment to explore repressed histories that still hold presence in a contemporary moment. Memory is thus invoked as an additional “text” to mobilise the conceptual framework, akin to how remembrance is often used in the continuous struggle for justice. Employing an autoethnographic methodology, which describes an analytical approach used to critically examine the researcher’s own experiences as a means to access greater understanding of cultural experience, I allow the reader to experience the exhibition through my own account. I argue that, as a nomadic curator, Ngcobo was freed from contextual, spatial, or methodological limitations traditionally bound to a colonial logic of curatorial practice. I convey that a nomadic curatorial approach can be adopted to critique traditional or institutional curatorial paradigms. To this end, I argue that Ngcobo was able to engage care in her practice by using reenactment to interrogate memory in a manner that may otherwise have been subdued within an institutional context.
  PubDate: 2020-06-01T00:00:00Z
The Big Druid’s photographs of trees : art and knowledge
- Authors: Suzanne de Villiers-Human
  Abstract: This article argues that the world-renowned multi-media artist, Willem Boshoff’s, digital image gallery of photographs of trees, flowers and plants on the digital domain of the internet and in his digital archive, forms part of a history of efforts by modern artists to dismantle and stage the reductive divisions between the arts and the natural sciences. By emphasising their agency to richly interweave layers of cultural meaning and ideological questioning, while producing cascades of other images, the objective is to situate the botanical photographs in Boshoff’s digital “image gallery” in an expanded history of imaging, and to explore the layered perspectives that this positioning may entail and divulge. The interpretation includes comparative visual material from atlases and other image galleries, landscape art and land art, photographic and cinematic images, diagrams and scientific “illustrations”, Druid Walks and performances, and so forth. The interpretation ventures to fathom the aesthetic, artistic and cultural significance of this body of photographs, as well as their power to ignite debates on the relationship between art, science, knowledge, wisdom, politics and culture.
  PubDate: 2020-06-01T00:00:00Z
Educating citizen designers in South Africa, Elmarie Costandius and Herman
Botes
- Authors: Audrey G. Bennett
  Abstract: Today, with decolonisation on the rise in the West, comes a timely compendium titled Educating citizen designers in South Africa edited by Elmarie Costandius, an associate professor of Visual Arts and coordinator of the Master of Arts in Visual Arts (Art Education) at Stellenbosch University, South Africa and Herman Botes, acting director of the Visual Communication Department at Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa. Educating citizen designers in South Africa proffers critical citizenship design education to confront the civic ramifications of historical colonialism and apartheid in contemporary South Africa. Together, Costandius and Botes lead a theoretically-fueled conversation with a group of design scholars from various South African educational institutions – including the University of Pretoria, The Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the University of Johannesburg, along with the editors’ respective universities – on what constitutes critical citizenship design pedagogy in present-day South Africa. The co-editors state vaguely, and in a somewhat limited way, that the book aims to ‘contribute to the critical citizenship discourse by offering a South African perspective’ (Constadius & Botes 2018:iv), but they contribute something more important than that, two-fold. On the one hand, Educating citizen designers in South Africa disseminates findings from educational research on critical citizenship pedagogy in design; and in so doing it contributes a cross-disciplinary research perspective to a global conversation on critical citizenship in design already underway. For instance, in the west, key texts that have emerged over the past decade and a half include Developing citizen designers (Resnick 2016) and Citizen designer: perspectives on design responsibility (Heller & Vienne 2003). On the other hand, Educating citizen designers in South Africa also contributes to social transformation efforts locally (in South Africa) as well as on a global scale.
  PubDate: 2020-06-01T00:00:00Z